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Virtual Contact Center Provider LiveOps Announces Record Growth

Virtual contact center solutions provider LiveOps today announced continued momentum and record growth in 2007 as the company "transforms the way enterprises launch and scale virtual contact centers," according to its news release.

Reflecting the intense interest in the virtual contact center model in the industry today, the company has grown year over year revenue by almost 70 percent in 2007 and has achieved profitability by adding large customers across a range of industries including eBay, Euro Pro, Kodak, LifeLock and MetLife. These customers are using a combination of LiveOps independent home agents and/or software as a service (Saas) applications to help improve the flexibility and service quality of their contact centers.

The company recently announced that it passed the milestone of one million minutes per day of calls running on its Saas platform and is on track to contract with over 20,000 home-based customer service agents by the first quarter of 2008. Every week, more than 3,500 individuals apply to contract with LiveOps as independent home-based businesses; and only the top five percent are selected.

“The contact center market is in desperate need of innovation. The offshoring of customer service has had a big backlash on customer satisfaction and customer service executives need to absorb additional capacity in a more flexible and cost effective way than is possible with traditional brick and mortar call centers,” said Maynard Webb, CEO of LiveOps. “LiveOps is helping enterprises leverage the power of on-demand contact center applications, combined with the quality of home agents to bring flexibility and rapid scalability into the contact centers of the 21st century. We are proud to be the trusted partner in virtual contact center technology and best practices.”

“We could not have scaled to the volume that we have, at this speed, without the flexibility of the LiveOps Saas platform,” noted Tammy Valdez, Client Services Director at LifeLock. “We can quickly launch and track a campaign, get feedback on call volume and then make changes on the fly to maximize results.”

“With LiveOps we can cherry pick licensed insurance agents and ensure we only use the most skilled agents,” commented Lynn McKenna, Senior Vice President at AEGON. “As a result, we’ve already realized a 30 percent lift in our conversion rate.” AEGON Direct Marketing Services is a leading direct marketer of life and supplemental health insurance and fee-based programs.

“Working with relief organizations to provide financial assistance and critical information after a major disaster requires lightning-fast speed and extraordinary scalability,” noted John R. Hall, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Greenwood & Hall, which worked with LiveOps to provide Spanish-speaking agents on a recent disaster relief program. “There are very few call centers that can ramp up to more than 300 agents in a matter of a few hours. LiveOps' ability to scale on-demand and accommodate the high call volume was invaluable to our successful relief and fundraising efforts.”

LiveOps also made some notable additions to its executive team and board in 2007. The company appointed new board members including: Jeff Jordan, OpenTable CEO; audit committee chair James Beer, CFO at Symantec; and marketing advisor Nanci Caldwell, former CMO at PeopleSoft. Recent adds to the executive team now includes, CEO Maynard Webb, former COO at eBay; President Worldwide Operations Jon Temple, former EVP at Hyperion; EVP and CFO Murray Demo, former CFO at Postini and Adobe; SVP of Channels and Alliances Mercedes Ellison, formerly with Hyperion; and VP of Marketing Azita Martin, former marketing executive at TuVox and Salesforce.com.

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IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more